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this'n'that
Aug. 9th, 2006 05:48 pmBecause I am the biggest geek that ever geeked, a mostly-fluffy fic I'm working on has somehow led me on a discovery of the Shetland Islands. I've been through Wikipedia, UK tourist sites, and a really, really cool place where you can click on parts of the Shetlands and see actual pictures.
Which, sadly, has severely lessened any desire I ever had to go there. Some of the pictures look neat, and I've heard the Shetlands can be quite lovely, but somehow whoever decided to take pictures of the Islands doesn't appear to have understood the concept of "sell the product." The pictures are almost uniformly dreary and dull. The sky is overcast, the landscape dull and flat, the buildings grey - and not in a picturesque limestone architecture way; more like a pre-fab concrete warehouse kind of way. It's like the photographer trudged around with a map and a camera for a few weeks, dutifully took pictures every few miles, carefully labelled them, scanned them, and organized them into this terrific site while miraculously managing to not look at a single one of them.
http://www.originart.com/oa/frame2.html
Go see. Some of the pictures of Lerwick are good, as are a few of Muckle Roe island, the castle in Scalway, and a few others. As for the rest... yup, that's a picture of an intersection in the middle of nowhere, all right. Oh look, there's another one. Ooh, and another intersection. And yet another! How many intersections are there on the Shetland Islands, anyway? And do they actually all look exactly the same?
click... click... click... ::fast-forward an hour or so::
::awed voice:: My god, they do.
***
Read a fic a while ago that was just awful. Which was weird, because it had been rec'd on a board where, by and large, good recs are mentioned. But hey, I was bored, and some parts were kinda cute, and the writing was typographically and grammatically correct and good (if you ignored the characters and situations), and it was H/D, and I was interested in seeing when and how the H/D would develop... so I kept plugging on despite my distaste of the cliched fanon!Draco and the subject matter (gay men's fluffy magazine), and my general bleh...
...and ended up loving it. And it wasn't that it had improved or anything; just that the characterisations gradually made more and more sense until by the end I was thinking the whole thing was perfect from beginning to end.
I remember having that happen with A Song for Arbonne. In the first chapters I wanted to chuck the book, and all its marvelously frivolous troubadors and starry-eyed romantics, into the toilet. That, or tell them to get a friggin' grip. And yet by the end, I loved them all.
Now if I could just remember the name and URL of the above fic.
Ah well. Guess I'll have to go re-read A Song for Arbonne.
***
My![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
hd_remix fic that I was agonizing over? Has, thank you god, been beta'd and immeasurably improved by ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
caliopeamphora. It's still not exactly stellar, 'cause you really can't make a silk purse out of a bat's ear, but at least I don't feel embarrassed by it any more.
::phew::
So now I'm just working on a fic exchange thingy and a Bond DVD Extra that sprang from the imagination of the samecaliopeamphora. I've never written Lucius before. It's... intriguing.
Which, sadly, has severely lessened any desire I ever had to go there. Some of the pictures look neat, and I've heard the Shetlands can be quite lovely, but somehow whoever decided to take pictures of the Islands doesn't appear to have understood the concept of "sell the product." The pictures are almost uniformly dreary and dull. The sky is overcast, the landscape dull and flat, the buildings grey - and not in a picturesque limestone architecture way; more like a pre-fab concrete warehouse kind of way. It's like the photographer trudged around with a map and a camera for a few weeks, dutifully took pictures every few miles, carefully labelled them, scanned them, and organized them into this terrific site while miraculously managing to not look at a single one of them.
http://www.originart.com/oa/frame2.html
Go see. Some of the pictures of Lerwick are good, as are a few of Muckle Roe island, the castle in Scalway, and a few others. As for the rest... yup, that's a picture of an intersection in the middle of nowhere, all right. Oh look, there's another one. Ooh, and another intersection. And yet another! How many intersections are there on the Shetland Islands, anyway? And do they actually all look exactly the same?
click... click... click... ::fast-forward an hour or so::
::awed voice:: My god, they do.
Read a fic a while ago that was just awful. Which was weird, because it had been rec'd on a board where, by and large, good recs are mentioned. But hey, I was bored, and some parts were kinda cute, and the writing was typographically and grammatically correct and good (if you ignored the characters and situations), and it was H/D, and I was interested in seeing when and how the H/D would develop... so I kept plugging on despite my distaste of the cliched fanon!Draco and the subject matter (gay men's fluffy magazine), and my general bleh...
...and ended up loving it. And it wasn't that it had improved or anything; just that the characterisations gradually made more and more sense until by the end I was thinking the whole thing was perfect from beginning to end.
I remember having that happen with A Song for Arbonne. In the first chapters I wanted to chuck the book, and all its marvelously frivolous troubadors and starry-eyed romantics, into the toilet. That, or tell them to get a friggin' grip. And yet by the end, I loved them all.
Now if I could just remember the name and URL of the above fic.
Ah well. Guess I'll have to go re-read A Song for Arbonne.
My
hd_remix fic that I was agonizing over? Has, thank you god, been beta'd and immeasurably improved by caliopeamphora. It's still not exactly stellar, 'cause you really can't make a silk purse out of a bat's ear, but at least I don't feel embarrassed by it any more.::phew::
So now I'm just working on a fic exchange thingy and a Bond DVD Extra that sprang from the imagination of the same
caliopeamphora. I've never written Lucius before. It's... intriguing.
